Making a WordPress site accessible to an international audience, as well as disabled users, older users, new users, etc, involves several design, content, and technical concerns. This talk will focus on the technical aspects:

• Unicode is the modern, international standard for character sets. It supports characters in almost every written language, from Japanese, to Klingon (SignWriting is currently under consideration for addition to Unicode). I authored an article in PHP Architect magazine on how to configure web servers, databases, and PHP to work correctly together to support the Unicode character set used on the web, UTF-8. I’ll focus on the most common site configuration “gotchas” that can turn your text into gibberish on a WordPress site, and how to address them.
• WordPress has a well developed internationalization process for creating language localizations for plugins and themes. For plugin and theme authors, I’ll provide an overview of this process, and discuss how it relates to accessibility.